By WILLIAM ARNOLD, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER MOVIE CRITIC

Published 10:00 pm, Thursday, June 9, 2005

Doug Liman, the director of "Mr. and Mrs. Smith," has been telling the world this past week that he fears his film's many "shocking sex scenes" are "so realistic" they will offend fans of Brad Pitt's ex, Jennifer Aniston.

That's his way of trying to capitalize on all the tabloid hysteria over a reported romance between Pitt and Angelina Jolie during the making of the film and Aniston's subsequent filing for a divorce.

To keep his masterpiece intact, Liman claims he actually had to fight his producer, who thought his steamiest scene was "too sexy," that people would see it and say, " 'Oh, that's how Angie did it.' It'll be like, 'She used her wiles to seduce him.' "

Shocking? Too sexy? Are these guys joking? There's no nudity, no passion and only a few brief, embarrassed clutches and teasing allusions. Like all big Hollywood movies these days, this one is scared to death of sex: It's all violence and explosions.

In fact, it may be emblematic of new-millennium Hollywood that this movie has turned out to be one more emotionless, brainless, overproduced action film.

Its story, which (in the tradition of Pitt's "Ocean's Twelve") seems to have been made up on the spot, is about a couple whom we meet cute in the office of a counselor: After five or so years of marriage, it seems, they've lost their sexual spark.

But what each spouse doesn't know is that the other is a trained freelance assassin. And when they learn this after the film's first few scenes, they're instantly estranged and out to knock each other off.

It's a black comedy -- not in the hard-edged Tarantino sense, maybe, but at least dark and immoral enough to ask us to sympathize with two people who appear to work for rival drug cartels and later join forces to rub out a federal witness.

The movie also has, at its heart, a pair of vaguely interesting ideas that it wants to explore/lampoon: a) that you can never really know another person, even your spouse; and b) that a little creative imagination can spice up even the dullest of marriages.

But its script can't make anything very clever out of these intentions, the banter is consistently witless and the jokes get broader and broader as the movie progresses under the usual assumption that the audience is so stupid it won't get anything else.

Director Liman fails to make his basic situation credible in the way that even a farce must to work properly, and his scenes also do not follow each other in any vaguely believable way: They're just non-sequitur setups for explosions.

His assertion that this is one sexually hot movie is ludicrously insincere: even its mean streak has no S&M bite. When, at one point, Pitt knocks Jolie to the ground and repeatedly, viciously kicks her in the face, it's just horrendously ugly.

Neither of the stars comes off well in this mess, but Jolie is the least offensive. She has a strong and unique presence, and a commanding sexual confidence that makes you suspect that, in better hands, she may have pulled off her "Honey West" character.

But even Pitt's biggest fans are likely to find him repulsive in this role. With his burr haircut, his macho posturing and tendency to chew junk food through every scene, he seems out to deliberately stomp all the soul out of his persona.

Pitt's gift is that he's beautiful and sensitive, and in movies like "A River Runs Through It" and "Troy," he's magical. But this now seems to embarrass him and, in his more recent efforts, he butches it up to such an extent that he comes off as an insecure phony-baloney.